Least accurate online videos on blood pressure are most popular

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Online videos can be a good
source of guidance for do-it-yourselfers, but consumers looking
for help managing high blood pressure are often getting bad
advice, according to a new study.

Researchers found that the most viewed and "liked" videos
about the topic on YouTube were uninformative, at best,
misleading, at worst.

"In one of the videos," said Dr. Nilay Kumar, who led the
study, "the natural cure specialist was addressing large crowds
of people and proclaiming things such as, 'salt has nothing to
do with hypertension,' which is the exact opposite of what the
standard care is."

Kumar, a physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance in
Massachusetts and clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School
in Boston, added, "I found it quite concerning that there is so
much misinformation."

Still, physicians should be aware that their patients are
seeking out and acting on this kind of information, he told
Reuters Health. That way, doctors can point their patients to
credible information and make positive use of online videos.

Kumar said he got interested in the videos while working at
a specialty hypertension clinic, where he noticed a number of
the patients coming in with treatments they had not been
prescribed.

"I asked one of my patients about this and they told me that
they had gotten the information on the Internet," Kumar said.

"That's when I got the idea that it might be interesting to
look at what kind of information about hypertension is out there
since it's such a common health problem."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
one in every three Americans has high blood pressure. Other
research shows that 67 percent of them are Internet users and
likely to seek online information related to their illness.

Kumar's team focused on YouTube, the most popular
video-sharing site, and searched the terms "hypertension" and
"blood pressure." That yielded more than 350,000 links. They
selected the first 200 that came up for each search term and
excluded those not in English or those related to special
circumstances like pregnancy or heart failure.

That left 209 videos that met their criteria and they had
independent experts rate those based on how well the content
covered the causes, complications, treatment and lifestyle
changes associated with hypertension. The videos were also
categorized as either useful, misleading or personal experience.

Only 63 percent of the online videos could be classified as
useful. A third of the videos were misleading and 4 percent
simply represented a patient's personal experience, the study
team reports in the Journal of the American Society of
Hypertension.

"Among the useful videos, the coverage for causes,
complications, treatment, lifestyle modification, all of these
were consistently higher," Kumar said.

A misleading video contained information that was not
scientifically proven, or contradicted guidelines from the
American Heart Association or the American Society of
Hypertension.

Examples of statements made in misleading videos included,
"hypertension has no relationship to the incidence of strokes"
or "treating high blood pressure leads to strokes."

The number of views per day and the number of "likes" for
misleading videos was usually higher than for the useful videos,
the researchers found.

Common among the misleading videos, was promotion of
holistic health and natural cures. More than half of them
included ads for alternative treatments not recommended by the
American Heart Association but available for sale online and 91
percent targeted hypertension patients directly.

Dr. David Calhoun, a physician and professor at the
University of Alabama in Birmingham, noted that although the
findings are consistent with what researchers know about digital
media and other diseases, it's encouraging that two-thirds of
the videos were considered accurate.

"Because hypertension is such a common problem, we need more
studies like this one to know how patients are educating
themselves and what they are being told about their condition,"
he said.

Doctors should ask patients about it in their medical
interviews and during follow-up visits, Calhoun said.

Likewise, patients should know there's valuable information
online but not all of it is useful, so it's important to
consider the source and to discuss it with their doctor before
taking any actions, he added.

The National Library of Medicine offers tips for telling
good online health information from bad on its MedLinePlus
website, here: http://1.usa.gov/1ltidkW.

Kumar thinks that YouTube, which is the third most popular
website on the Internet, has much more power to influence
patients than text. He pointed out that videos containing
patient experiences were engaging, and universities and
professional organizations should pay attention to this.

"I think a lot of patients are looking for how others
experience hypertension and it could be anything from side
effects of medications to any complication related to
hypertension," he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1ue7MCO Journal of the American
Society of Hypertension, online May 12, 2014.